Developing distributed applications

Building a distributed application, such as bgp-ping, can be a major undertaking. Unit testing and debugging can help spot and fix a lot of bugs, but these processes can be time-consuming. In certain cases, when an application has different components, developing your code iteratively may require some manual orchestration. Steps such as building binary files and container images, starting the software process, enabling logging, and triggering events are now something you need to synchronize and repeat for all the components that include your application.

The final developer experience tool that we will cover in this chapter was specifically designed to address the preceding issues. Tilt helps developers automate manual steps, and it has native integration with container and orchestration platforms, such as Kubernetes or Docker Compose. You let it know which files to monitor, and it will automatically rebuild your binaries, swap out container...